Wynetta Pearson Ussery says there were only two times in her life that she recalled her father cried in her presence.
The first was Aug. 27, 1960, when Ussery’s uncle, Rutledge Pearson, was bloodied “with (a) hole in the head where he had been hit.”
Pearson was a leader in the Jacksonville NAACP who advised the local high school students who participated in sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. Their teenaged civil disobedience was met with violence from adults…